Friday, October 5, 2012

Designs for Red in the Late Game

This is a sequel to my earlier article on cards that make a slower style of play more viable for red, particularly in multiplayer formats. You might want to read that one first. Here's one example from each category in the previous article: a fast sweeper, a reset button, a persistent threat, an ETB value fatty, and a boiling pot.

Stop Bugging Me, All of You (rare)
1RR
Instant
CARDNAME deals damage equal to the number of attacking creatures to each creature.

Sometimes a huge blowout, but sometimes worse than Pyroclasm. The more aggressive the opponent is, the better this is against them, which seems reasonably in line with the priorities of a slow deck.

erifdliW (rare)
4RR
Sorcery
Each player chooses three lands he or she controls, then sacrifices the rest. CARDNAME deals five damage to each creature.

This packs some of the punch of Wildfire, but with a "fairer" land destruction mode. Is rewarding players for sandbagging lands too perverse an incentive? It feels okay to me, but I played a lot of casual back when Armageddon was in print, so my calibration may be off.

Warstorm Phoenix (rare)
2RR
Creature - Phoenix
Flying
Whenever you attack with three or more creatures, you may return CARDNAME from your graveyard to the battlefield, tapped and attacking.
3/2

The nature of the trigger makes this better suited to multiplayer than Chandra's Phoenix, and it provides a larger reward. Shout out to Shawn Main for the Assault mechanic, of course.

Dragon Archmage (mythic rare)
5RR
Creature - Dragon
Flying
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, you may return up to three target sorcery cards from your graveyard to your hand.
Whenever CARDNAME deals combat damage to a player, add RRRRR to your mana pool. Until end of turn, this mana doesn't empty from your mana pool as steps and phases end.

Is the mana ability an unwarranted bleed from green? I think it's fair game; sufficiently old dragons know how to cast Seething Song, that's all.

15 comments:

Stop Bugging Me, All of You (rare)1RRInstantCARDNAME deals damage equal to the number of attacking creatures to each creature.

could be used for both attacking and defending strategies. I would feel a more red way to do this would be:

Get out of our way, All of You (rare)1RRInstantCARDNAME deals damage equal to the number of attacking creatures you control to each creature (optional to each creature target/ your opponents player controls/control).

There can be many variations, caring about the power of the creature attacking etc etc. Caring about creatures attacking you is more in the white part of the color pie.

erifdliW (rare)4RRSorceryEach player chooses three lands he or she controls, then sacrifices the rest. CARDNAME deals five damage to each creature.

RnD seems to shy away from such cards which can read like griefer cards that do not allow you to cast the spells you have in hand. Discard is ok, land destruction of this magnitude (compare this to the 3R cost of destroying a single land that is the norm...) Land destruction is not the way to go. However land restriction could be in the form of creatures with a reverse bloodcast power:

Good thoughts; "harass" looks like a R/W combat mechanic that could have some real mileage too it, though with the creature-centric focus of modern magic it may be too potent in Standard and almost meaningless in older formats.

As to your opinion on Wildfires, it's only been two years since Destructive Force, so I don't think we can make serious assumptions about that style of card. It may be more of a 3cc -> 4cc : 6cc -> 7cc shift to help push things in a particular direction.

I seem to recall reading MaRo talking about land destruction, and his take was that they were moving it to higher costs and smaller efficiency, not removing it from the game altogether. The reasoning for that is that there are many people who love land destruction (griefers mostly) but as a mechanic it does not push the game towards interesting decisions, and removes the opportunity to cast spells, just like counterspell did. It is no happenstance that both stone rain and counterspell got a bump in their cost, coinciding with giving the ability to play 3-drops to your opponent. In magic it is different than in medicine: a cure is better than a prevention. I think that that will be my amateur magic the gathering designer creed.

Ritual of ruin can become a 3-lands destruction card, but will not always be so, and is so late in the game that it only reduces you to 4 lands if you choose to do that. It does reset things but in an asymetric kind of why, which at 7 mana is ok.

You are however correct in pointing out they printed destructive force. There will always be cards like these from time to time, but these virtual resets are not pushed for competitive play. They are not my cup of tea when implemented this way because they tend to better fit red/green strategies with fatties and acceleration than give red a proper answer and way to come back in the late game. I do not have a good substitution to suggest here unfortunately.

Conceptually, I feel that if you're doing it on-attack, you're incentivizing having combat tricks to benefit that attack. So, unless you were to put that ability on Hypersonic Dragon, it isn't quite what you want on a red dragon.

Avatar of Strife is a cool design. I like how it forces itself to attack, too.

I think Dragon Archmage should cost less - it could be a card that spawns Constructed decks around it without being a must-include in every deck. (The suggestion is not for pleasing Spikes, but for increasing deck diversity.) In that case, it could be a Rare without messing up Limited (because it's not easy to get 3 sorceries in your graveyard in Limited).

I also like how it's a creature that allows you to cast big X spells. They should definitely have more of those, since it's a way to bring back mana ritual effects that's more focused on the fun things you can do with mana boosting rather than the degenerate ones.

It gives me an idea for a "volcano" type spell: Pent-up Energy 1REnchantmentWhenever you cast an instant or sorcery, put a charge counter on ~.Sacrifice ~: Add R to your mana pool for each charge counter on ~.

Yeah, the cost on Dragon Archmage was more a "let's pick a random big number for a fatty" than any sort of careful calculation. I'd like to see a dragon succeed in constructed as much as the next Timmy!

Or:Lotus Seed0ArtifactWhenever you cast a spell, put a charge counter on ~.Remove 3 charge counters from ~, Sacrifice: Add three mana of any one color to your mana pool. Use this ability only if you have not cast a spell this turn.

I'm not at all surprised how these cards feel very very red yet are so well-suited for control decks, but I am quite pleased by it.

Tweaks / Niggles / Inspirations:

It's jarring to follow "attacking creatures" with "each creature" in Stop Bugging Me, All of You. I would expect the recipients to be the defender's creatures.

The fact that your Wildfire variant costs 6 but drops players to 3 lands is what makes me like it. Granted, you can (and should) Ur-Golem's Eye or Seething Song into it but at least at face value it costs you three land.

I would also offer up something that stops players from casting Big spells. NRR Sorcery—Each player sacrifices lands until they control six or fewer lands.

Maybe 1RR Enchantment—Whenever a land ETB, sacrifice ~. If you do, destroy that land. ...Probably not.

Warstorm Phoenix is beautiful and I want a playset. My only concern is that getting back one makes getting back the next easier. Possibly too easy. Or possibly just awesome.

Why does Dragon Archmage only know spells you've already cast? Why does he give them to you? Why does he make mana for you? Shouldn't he just cast the spells himself? Too similar to Djinn of Wishes? Inspired...

Dragon Savant 4RRCreature-DragonWhenever ~ attacks or blocks, you may pay XR. If you do, search your library for a red spell with X in its mana cost and cast it without paying its mana cost. (X is X.)

As far as Dragon Savant is concerned, I love the updated effect. My only issue is the shuffling aspect. I feel that design should remove shuffling whenever possible as is slows down games significantly.

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We met as competitors and collaborators in the second Great Designer Search. After the contest was over, we decided we still had things to say about designing Magic: the Gathering. So we started a blog.